Over the last two weeks there has been an extensive process to analyze the amount of work remaining to complete the upgrade. Included in the readiness process was each of theUMasscampuses and UITS (the President’s Office organization that supports our PeopleSoft applications).In the end, it was concluded thatUMass would go-live over the first weekend in May with a scheduled go-live on Monday, May 4th. Only Human Resouce staff will be in the system on day one and will soon be followed by all departmental timekeepers. Later in the spring, we will open up the HR system for new self-service functionality.

Now that we know the date we will be upgrading, we will now go ahead and finalize a training schedule for our current HR system users.

Please post any questions or comments you have.

One of the majorgoals of this HR Direct implementation is to equip UMass employees and managers with self-service tools to manage much of their Human Resource activities. While these tools won’t be available to all right away, we do intend to rollout additional features in the future.

Employee Self Service:
ByJune 2009, all non-student employees will have the ability to login to HR Direct using their campus email username & password.Some personal and job datainformation will be available during this first phase of the rollout as will the ability to view the bi-weeklypay advice.See the Employee Self-Service fact sheet for more details.

As additional testing is completed andappropriate business practices developed, there will be new self-service features introduced. These willallow employees more direct access to maintain personal and jobdata such as home address, phone numbers; and tax withholding.

Beginning in May, Lowellwill be pilotingemployeeself-service for time reporting. During this pilot approximately 40employees will be reporting their weekly time viaself-servicewith NO PAPER timesheets. Theseonline timesheets will electronically route to their manager for their electronicapproval– no need for a timekeeper to reenter this data. Upon successful completion of this pilot, the campus will seek to expand thisto moreand more users with a goal of eliminating the paper timesheet!

Manager Self-Service
Also in the spring, we will pilot some of the Manager Self-Service functionality which allows for managers to

• view the employees reporting to them and
• initiate some human resource transactions without need for a paper trail

We will expand the number of manager self-service users once this pilot has been successfully tested and stabilized.

Please share any questions, comments, or suggestions you have.

If all goes according to plan we will be upgrading to the new HR environmentin earlyApril. We haven’t yet figured when all timekeepers and our Pilot Manager and Time Reporing users will be allowed into this new enviornment, but more details will be coming. And more broadly, we still need to figure when we will open the systemup to all UMass Lowell employees. While it sounds neat to let everyone in on day #1, the reality is that we have limited campus support resources so we need to stagger roll-on to best postiion our selves to be successful. I think we’d all agree that producing pay checks is the first priority so we are likley to limit who has access to HRDirect that first week. Exact rollout details are still being planned, but the concept is to crawl first before we try to walk and run.

Over the next couple weeks the campus and UMass project teams will be working together to ensure we are ‘ready’ to go live. This readiness process will have all participants evaluating any risks associated with going live. The goal is to identify any risk and then reacting to those risks with apprporiate strategies to mitigate them and ensure overall ‘readiness’ to go live.

As always, if you have questions please let me know.

-Rich

This has been an extremely busy week for the campus Human Resource office. They have been engaged in User Acceptace Testing (UAT) throughout the last few days. UAT is an overall 4 week effort for the UMass campuses to get into the upgraded software and test to see that data is migrated well from our older HR system and that they can use the new software to do their key tasks — hiring, enrolling in benefits, entering time, and processing pay checks. Within each of those broad areas there are many more specific tasks which are part of the testing process. This testing is primarily being done by Human Resource staff andwe are doing some testing using the security roles that a timekeeper or employee will have when we go live.

Testing is a frustrating task in any project as unfortunately you find things that don’t work. This week has been no exception as we had a lot of issues tied to security, some with hardware and connectivity, and others with some application issues. The campus and central project teams will work to resolve these issues quickly and they will be retested before we exit this testing phase. And while there were a fair volume of issues identified, there have not been any ‘show stoppers’ which should keep us from going-live with the system in April.

This week we also had some planning sessions for the training delivery that will be occuring. Jose Guerrero from Information Technology Training is currently developing the schedule of classes. More information with be forthcoming in the weeks ahead as all of the training will occur in March and into April.

If you have particular questions or concerns please let me know.

Regards,

Richard Conley
Campus Project Manager